A Single Tale.

“Consider this a love letter addressed to a narrow acre along the never ending gamut of pain. The acre that is mine, the acre that comforts me…”
She wrote this on a pink Post-it then spat her gum out in it. There were no right words, and if there were she couldn’t harness them. Not today. It had been another day in the void, ushered in by nightmares lasting too long. Waking up late beside a familiar grunting body, that grew colder and stranger by the day, surveying the mess they had made together, the perfectly crafted rut, then getting into the car for a pointless series of circles around an ugly wasteland of a city resulting in a seventy dollar parking ticket, a headache and a broken spirit. She was depressed. And she was alone at the counter. The bitter coffee twisting her bowels was making her regret having ordered it, having chosen this diner, having moved to LA to begin with. Her mind slipped off into the wonderful, cushiony world of self-pity. She allowed herself to hate things with a teenage intensity. But unlike a teenager who can hate with abandon, her loathing of everything large, small and Los Angeles, was wrapped in a flour tortilla of guilt gifted to her by a Roman Catholic mother and more recently by her Yoga instructor. Both of who, in their own way, preached the virtues of patience, grace and gratefulness in the face of adversity. The universe doesn’t give gifts to whiners. This theory left her striking, then apologizing, like a reluctant dominatrix, at the world. The whole thing on a loop in her mind as the subtext asked the same persistent question, “What the fuck are you going to do?” The loop, the rut, and the closed doors--the doors she couldn’t even see. She was throwing darts in the dark at elusive targets, at promising, lying, flakey, LA targets, which said one thing than did exactly the opposite for no apparent reason. She felt like the universe was trying to tell her something but she didn’t know what. What to do? Well, she quit Yoga for one. She had tried to be one of those girls. Really tried, for a solid week at least, but the heart wants what it wants and the body is nothing more than its vehicle. There are other ways to work out. She wrote:
“It always comes back to this. And it’s funny because I never lose the “O” ring. It stays with me as if it knows I’ll need it, like an ex-boyfriend that refuses to move on. It waits for months, years, it waits because it knows me better than I know myself.”
She let her hand fall to her side and touched the skin behind her left knee. The welt was still raised. She shivered. It was the first time she had felt good all day so she pinched her stocking with two fingers and let it snap against the welt recreating a kind of mini-version of its conception. She thanked the universe for that. She sipped her coffee, determined for some indefinable reason to finish it, and turned the ring around on her finger. It had gotten what it wanted. And to think, only a few months ago it had been sulking in her jewelry box as its owner was tromping around town in a fancy diamond and gold creation, her skin as lovely and welt free as a welt free baby’s.
The problem with the “O” ring was that it had a horrible sense of timing. For one thing, it always started getting really demanding in times of financial and emotional instability. She raised her hand to eye level and let the silver “O” dangle above her palm. Things weren’t all bad. It worried her when she had sudden thoughts like that because it made her feel Bi-polar. She shifted in her seat awakening the sore nerve endings hidden beneath her skirt like a secret. Her secret. There were very few that knew the extent of her perversion, even her ex-fiancé (the body in the bed) didn’t want to know. She resented him for that among other things as a way to place blame away from herself for lying to begin with. She had never crawled over carpet for him, nor could she imagine it. He would think she was performing and performing was bad. Love was supposed to be this great magical thing where you stare into one another’s eyes and fall into a field of daisies before making peg-a into slot-b love like they do in music videos. It was a spontaneous blowjob in the afternoon while she ignores the fact that he’s probably thinking of the last bit of porn he jerked off to. It happened in the morning when, if she loved him, she wouldn’t say anything about his breath. She would climb on top of him and force herself to be turned on, force herself not to focus on the faint smell of sour milk and wonder why she ignored it the first time that they kissed. That was what love was supposed to be.
Well, she had never been in love. All the times she said so she was lying and all the times she felt so, it was nothing more than infatuation, a reoccurring theme to be sure. In her writing it all came down to that. How boring. It’s probably why she had been so sterile lately. Or maybe it was the fact that she had written as much as is possible to write without being read. She felt like a tree purposely uprooting herself in the forest just to see if she could be heard falling, well enough was enough already. She had left behind more carnage than a group of coked up lumberjacks, more than enough to be sifted through without indulgently creating more. She lost her bar job, a tireless labor of self-sabotage that she wasn’t even aware of until it was pointed out to her by her honeycomb of a blonde behemoth boss. Albeit indirectly, thanks to the woman’s inability to string a sentence together that didn’t include the words mini-dress, tummy tuck, or my rich husband who gave me this job I’m horrible at. And--there, somewhere between cursing the heavens, and the blame game, and the apologies, and the hurt, and the feeling of getting older, and the trees senselessly falling to the ground in agonizing pain, her little sliver friend jingles its round metal charm and she knows what her soul needs. Polarization.
She had gotten it. Saturday last. Her fingers went back to the welt. She traced it, sending a spike of heat all the way up into her throat. It evoked images, memories that to write about, would present as tasteless erotica. There was so much more to it. It was a strip tease of emotion. Every strike, every hit, was an emotional garment falling to the ground. She searched for a way to highlight these feelings on her pink Post-its while waiting for her Chicken Cesar Salad without sounding trivial, without giving too much power to the story as a sexual encounter, which it was, and wasn’t. Her former lover would hate any story that came from such an experience, as if she would tell him. She kept it hidden from him by locking the bathroom door while she changed, studying her bruises in private, feeling their warmth even after days. He’d prefer her to stick to her loftier subjects, her New Yorker-able subjects, her stories and plays woven by the lighter side of her psyche. But ironically it was only lightness she had felt that night, lightness and freedom, even abandon. Its only dark side, she could rationalize, was in its hokey veneer and perhaps in its lure. Could one become addicted to pain for clarity’s sake. She hoped so then promptly apologized to the universe for the thought. Note:
“It was the ring that caught his attention. He’d admired it, and to a mind like his it signified a blank billboard of endless promotional possibility. I laughed and though of the friend who had given it to me. Married, bogged down with all the things I’d recently forfeit, I was his little secret and the ring was our tiny key, a key to experience for me, and to voyeurism for him.”
As she tore up the Post-it on which she’d just written, she remembered a winter’s day back in New York when this friend had called her. She was in the shower but thought it safe to call him back and tell him about the snow and how pretty it looked collecting outside her window. A woman answered and she hung up. He didn’t call again for weeks. She wrote a story about an auction and sent it to him. He corrected her spelling and sent it back without a word. Reading it was like getting a blowjob in the afternoon or like hearing a loud crash and finding that a tree has fallen on your car.
Her salad arrived. The waitress asked if she could throw away her ripped up Post-its. Not knowing what to say she asked for more coffee but a breeze picked up from out of nowhere and blew the pink squares, the ones that weren’t stuck to the table, up and onto the floor. The waitress apologized and kneeled to pick them up. She should have helped, but the girl looked so lovely crawling on the dirty floor. Interrupting the moment would have been an affront to one of those rare, random moments of beauty that so seldom present themselves. She watched the girl in slow motion, she was a Vargas print, a living recreation of a fifties pin-up doll. Her mind flashed to Saturday night.
Kneel. That’s how it started.
That’s not how it started. It had started on Christmas Eve when a friend had invited her to go over there. And “there” was funny. “There” was downright comical, like they all are. Everything in that world is funny. What is funnier than a group of suburbanites dressing up in leather and hitting each other on the ass? Not fucking much. But is it funnier than sex? The whole esthetic is beside the point. And even though there was no way in the world she believed that to be true, it didn’t make much of a difference now. He could have been wearing a fucking spacesuit, he wasn’t--which was fortunate, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He had a skill, no, a set of skills that started organizing themselves like playing cards in his brain the moment he saw her ring. Whether or not she found him conventionally attractive was also beside the point. She wouldn’t fuck her massage therapist, or her Yoga teacher. To the layman it’s a bit like that. She would use that in her story. She ate some chicken then wrote:
“I am your instrument. Manipulate me to get the sounds you want. Play me well and I will sing for you.”
She folded the Post-it till it could be folded no more and left it in the sugar canister. The she traced the word Stradivarius in salt granules and crumbs. It’s like that. It’s as sexual as that. No more no less. She tried to conjure images that would back it up, make it clearer, but it began and ended with that single metaphor. How does a violin feel after being played? Light. Awake. Perhaps a bit stretched. It still sounded to sexual. Was she projecting? Maybe. There was simply more to it:
“Kneel. And I did, but it wasn’t a solo effort. He went with me to the floor, pressing his knees against the backs of my knees till they buckled.”
She suspended that moment in thin air, breathing it into her abdomen and letting it go slowly. An ant made his way along the wall toward the sugar holder. Maybe he was one of those reconnaissance ants, she thought. Was he specially trained or had he done something wrong to end up with this detail? She decided to help by moving the canister closer to him. When that didn’t work she scooped him up using the edge of the Post-it and deposited him in the pile of crumbs that still kind of read, Stradivarius. She was God, and God had been merciful. She watched the ant for a while and thought about why it had been taking her so long to get a new job. He hoisted a crumb up onto his back. She still had nothing. On a Post-it she wrote:
“Jane of all trades, master of none. Except my own universe, the one in my mind.”
Then she wrote:
“I am Goddess of the Ants.”
This guy, the one at the place, who had admired her ring, wore shiny shoes with a kind of silver bar across the toe part. Ask a girl in her position the color of his eyes and she may come up empty handed, ask the color and make of his shoes and get a monologue. She was close to them. Her eyes were down, and this man, with these shoes, systematically peeled away the layers of her life as if she was an onion, and he did so without crying. There were times early on where she thought she wouldn’t be able to handle it. He delivered a surprising amount of pain, but her life thus far had left her with a sort of convoluted mantra about what things that don’t kill you have a tendency to do, so she took it with gritted teeth and found herself wanting to go deeper.
“There are many lessons in submission which I have yet to learn. I’m spoiled. I need discipline. But I also need to be the center of attention.”
Like the job thing. Fuck the job thing. There were times, to many to mention when she’d been coasting in the past. A wind always picked up somewhere. Her family, who had been patient, advised her that perhaps now might be a good time to change planes, to give up the coaster for one with an engine. You can still write, they would say. She was even toying with going back to school, maybe becoming a teacher. She shifted her sore thighs and laughed at the prospect. With all that she’d done? There are some things that don’t go away. There are some e-type publications bearing her name that wouldn’t look so hot on a teaching resume. Not to mention photos of her (shock, horror) in books (!) of her in her element, wearing little more than what God gave her, a guilty little ring of silver dangling from her middle finger like an accomplice. But like it was with most things, she had brought it on herself. Laid the tracks for the crazy train, as it were. Add to that an over active Corpus luteum, a Cancer sun and a bad moon rising, and you come out with ten kinds of crazy. So what breaks through? What clarifies, and through what magical mystery means can she hold it together for the tour, for the impending onslaught of emotional self-mutilation?
“I’m not going to use my whips on you.”
That’s what he had said. She quoted him now on yet another Post-it. The polarization had begun. She had been stripped of the outermost layers. Gone was the triviality of day to day, the rut had been annihilated by a stealth rut-buster in the shape of a riding crop, bearing the insecurity layer which, had been burst by well chosen undergarments and the fact that her legs looked eight miles long in heals. Underneath that was her paranoia, whose biggest fear is ultimately, ultimate pain, so off it went without to much trouble, and below paranoia, after slashing through a couple of other hard skins, like pride, ego, and well, more pride, he had finally made it to down to her id, her holy, bare bones id, where all that she was lay quivering against a polished wooden rack. She wanted into the point of the pyramid and he, being a consummate professional, knew by her smiles and her tendency to sing while being flogged, that it would be rude not to take her there. So he went to her. He held her by the hair and asked (even though he didn’t pose it as a question) if he could use his whips.
Earlier that night she had met a soft-spoken Israeli photographer who was in the midst of a project about pain. His subjects would recount to him the most painful experience of their lives as he photographed them. When asked her to take part and she said no. She wrote:
“Yes. Please. Please. Yes.”
She didn’t consider herself to be a person capable of such a project because she didn’t feel as though she had ever felt real pain. She considered herself lucky, innocent, and trusting. She’d met teenagers with more depth. Hell, she’d written teenagers with more depth. Was that what this was, a juvenile safari into faux-suffering? How very sad. Or maybe she just wanted to feel, or maybe she was more closely related to the apathetic youngsters she wrote about, or maybe she was a pain slut.
“I see-saw from self-pity to self-loathing as if it’s my job. But between every see, and every saw, there is a split second of water bubble levelness. It is there where things get done. It is there where I set up my desk.”
Things could be level again. With her id on the rack like whale bones drying in the sun, she searched through tightly shut eyelids for the horizon. It came and went as the single tail kissed her back, her thighs, and the bit in between. He had her turn and face him. He had her open her eyes. The room was red, all its accents black, (as was to be expected.) The lights were not low and sexy, but at the level of a functioning office, garish. Around the room were hysterically clad extras. Somber faced, with hungry eyes, their egos still firmly intact and all the more embarrassed for it. She was sweating, screaming, squirming, singing, this whalebone in the sun. Recalling this, she wrote:
“The snake kept striking over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…” Till she ran out of room on the Post-it.
But it wasn’t enough. If the single tail was the garden snake, then the one he went for next was the cobra, the adder, the python. He held it to her neck. He cut off her laughter with it. He wanted to know what was so funny. “None of this is real,” she told him. “This is real,” he replied, lifting her chin with the body of the tapered snake. He asked her if she was okay before using it one her, but he didn’t wait for an answer.
“This is real,” she wrote.
It had been a long day. She was still pissed about the seventy dollar ticket she had gotten while looking at an apartment in a building there was no way she could afford. She had to be out of her place in two and a half weeks, she was nearly broke, unemployed and single. She was annoyed that she, a New Yorker, had been beaten by Los Angeles this easily, and she was annoyed now that she had run out of Post-its. She paid her bill and though of that night, writing the only important words of the day on the inner lining of her brain.
“I made it home. I hit the bed and was overwhelmed to find that I had been enlightened. Not in a big way. Not in the elusive way that monks and saints are. It was a very human awakening. As my tired, half-drunk, swollen body throbbed above the mattress, I found the following to be true: Nothing matters. The body is only a vehicle. And it’s time to get off the see-saw--time to walk towards the horizon.”
Stocking snap, ring jingle and paper mache in layers on id bones--all of it left the café and went out to the car. It was getting dark in LA, in a few hours she would put the day to rest as if it was a suffering dog, then she would wake-up and do it all again.